


Laws of Aesthetics

by dorothy_notgale, Tromperie



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 1890s, But Very Pretty At That, Intercrural Sex, Is Basically Window Dressing, Longer than expected, M/M, Oh No It Grew Feels, Pompeii, Roleswap AU, Roman baths, Sensualist vs Humanist FIGHT, Sex, Smut, The Aesthetic Movement, This Is Not The Epic Deep AU You're Looking For, You're Welcome For The Pornography, if you know what i mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-05-19 20:32:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19363684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tromperie/pseuds/Tromperie
Summary: ROLESWAP AUEverything looks different. Everything is the same.Three encounters between an angel and a demon on the road to the Apocalypse.In 79 AD, an angel and a demon take a bath and discuss their personal philosophies. What happens next is both... deeply predictable, and catalyst to many changes.





	1. Pompeii, 79 AD

**Author's Note:**

> We didn't intend to do a roleswap AU. But we spent so long discussing why it was a bad idea that, well... *gestures at THIS*  
> Hope you enjoy!  
> ~Dorothy

“Do you know the wonderful thing about Rome?” The demon asked, swirling a cup delicately between his fingers. He waited--it was only polite to give the illusion of conversation. 

“No,” mumbled the angel, who had one eye on the crowd and one on his drinking companion. That was wise. It was why he had fared much better than the others. 

“They love a debate,” the demon went on, properly cued. “It’s so utterly charming. I think I could listen to them talk for hours.” 

“Be easier if that’s all you were doing. Listening, I mean.” He said it so dourly, and yet here they were. Hardly their first meeting

“It’s an open forum. It would be rude of me not to offer a few ideas of my own.” Above all else, Aziraphale[1] despised rudeness. He tapped his cup gently against against his opposite number’s. “This isn’t like you at all. Where’s the fire?”

“Fire’s your lot’s business,” Crowley grumbled. “...fudged a miracle.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” That was true, for the angel remained the only halfway decent conversational company Aziraphale had found. And now he was woefully unfit for the task. “Here, I know something that will cheer you up.” 

“I really doubt you do.” Crowley’s tawny-brown eyes rolled sarcastically, the gesture somehow taking in Aziraphale from sandals to ornamented cloak-clasp and managing to convey that all was simply beyond the pale for acceptable conduct. “Not in the mood to flay any innocents today, m’afraid.”

Aziraphale felt his own eyes, flat and round and golden like a raptor’s, narrow behind the lenses he’d begun wearing by habit. But he mastered his impulse to pique, and instead gave the gentle smile which lulled so many to whom he was sent.

(He hadn’t been sent to this dove, but… here they were. And all would unfold as it should, for the Plan.)

“You’re tense,” he said, reaching out to grasp a smooth shoulder and relishing how it grew hard as marble beneath his hand. “You may be Divine in spirit, but surely you know by now that the flesh has its own demands. If your soul is too disquieted to aid, start by nourishing the body.”

“I’m fine.” Crowley said, bringing his cup to his mouth in a move which just so happened to allow him to slip from beneath Aziraphale’s feather-light touch.

“You need some pampering, in the human style.” There had been other angels come sniffing around, once. He had not saved any patience for them. “Weren’t you telling me the other day about the public baths?” 

Crowley’s muscles wound further into knots. “Don’t remember,” he said, which wasn’t the same as a lie.

Aziraphale hid a grin. “‘A triumph of human brilliance,’ I think you called it.” 

“Shut up.” It was adorably petulant. 

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to go by myself. Don’t worry yourself, I can find others to occupy my time. I’m sure that there will be no end of politicians--” 

“Fine!” Crowley stood. “Let’s go already. Can’t let you burn down the whole city.” 

“I would never.” He had _people_ for that. 

 

* * *

 

 

The water was everything Crowley’d imagined when he heard about the place: seething-hot and plentiful. He sank down everything under the tip of his nose was submerged, listening to the chatter of voices bouncing off the walls. Rich, poor, young, and old; this was what it was meant to be like. All the barriers broken down, and everyone talking. It made him believe that it was all worth doing. Safely obscured, he smiled. 

“Didn’t I tell you?” Aziraphale was stretched out upon a bench nearby looking all the more obscene for the towel draped across his nethers. With the rest of his soft, pampered skin exposed, beads of water sliding across bare nipples and collecting in soft curves, it was less modesty than advertisement. 

“S’alright,” he admitted, the words coming out soggy and garbled. The demon clearly heard them anyway. “What about you?”

“Hmm?” 

“Doesn’t all this...mean something to you? You were angels, you’ve got feelings, or you had.” His need to know was suddenly a beating, battering thing in his chest. It seemed impossible that the pleased, grinning thing beside him were a truly empty pit. 

Aziraphale’s smile widened, and his fair curls bounced when he threw back his head and let out a hearty laugh.

Crowley watched, feeling more distant with every achingly human sound and twitch.

“Forgive me, my friend. I trust you will, as it is… theoretically… your stock-in-trade. I was simply amused at your assertion that _angels_ feel anything at all for this place.” He rolled onto his belly, propping his chin on the heel of a beautifully plump hand. “From where I sit, we demons have far more right to cherish the pleasures of the world than anything I might once have been.”

There was a pricked-in mark on the back of his shoulder, a woad-blue design of an owl as intricate as it was barbaric. Crowley had never before noticed it, hidden beneath the robes and cloaks.

“How so? All you do is ruin things.” Not that that was necessary. If Crowley sounded bitter, well, he was, at his own failings.

“I serve the Plan, dear boy. Anything I can spoil was made to be so, just as I was made to fall and you to catch me.”

“Say _wha--_ ” Crowley startled, sending an uncouth ripple through the water

“Generally speaking. Your duties, you know.” Enigmatic little curl of lips, as though Crowley were simply _too_ amusing for words. “It is one of the few great compensations for what I do that I might walk this Creation and sample her wonders while they last. And while I do.”

“What wonders are there, then? To you?”

The round bits of glass were fogged with the heat, and had been none too clear to begin with, so Crowley wondered what visions were instead dancing behind the weird eyes pointed off at the mosaic wall.

“The sun on my shoulder and face for hours, enough to warm me through so that the heat stays even into the night and makes linens delicious against the sting. Fresh-killed meat bursting juices on my tongue, followed by the sweetness and tang of ripened fruit.” A solemnity crept into Aziraphale’s always-gentle voice. “A scroll or book of true knowledge well-written in good ink that will last, if kept safe--how I do regret Alexandria--” and then his head swiveled almost too far on his neck, seeming to meet Crowley’s gaze head-on. “The touch of flesh, damp and supple with olive oil and need beneath my hand and mouth.”

Crowley froze. It was very difficult to swallow, as though some sweet poison had shot him through. The thoughts on his tongue jostled and jammed one another, and so the winner was a dumbfounded little grunt. 

“I’m sorry. I don’t wish to be cruel.” Crowley was freed of that gaze, and oh how he missed it. “I shouldn’t very well taunt an angel with things forbidden to him.” 

 _He’s winding you up_. “There’s no rule against angels doing...that.” 

“I think you’ll find the nephilim quite strongly disagree with you there.” 

“That’s with humans. Doesn’t count.” He pushed his hair back, barely aware that he was leaning closer as he made his point. “'Course you can’t with humans, it’s not fair. They don’t know what they’re getting into.”

“That hardly leaves you many options. The beasts of the land? Bad look, that. Other angels? I certainly can’t imagine. Or...” Aziraphale paused, as if the words were on the tip of his wicked tongue.

 _Walked right in_ . Crowley politely told his inner monologue to shove it, which left his unattended complexion plenty of time to burn red. “I wouldn’t do it with _you_.” 

“But why at all? You haven’t answered my question.” 

“To...that…” he fell quiet. _Think, really think_. And he found he had an answer after all. “It’s meant to be love, isn’t it? Words aren’t going to reach everyone. Blessings take all kinds of forms.”

“My dear,” Aziraphale hung between droll and delighted, “are you offering to fuck me to salvation?” 

“I most certainly am not!” Crowley snapped, instantly regretting how priggish he sounded, then regretting the regret, then giving up on emotions more complex than irritation as a bad job altogether. “I’m not--we’re just talking. Hypothetically.”

The sound of someone laughing cut through their conversation, a reminder that all was public here, and perhaps because of that Aziraphale slid into the water once again, considerably closer than the distance of about a passus[2] he’d previously maintained.

“Whatever you say,” he whispered, smooth as butter. “So--hypothetically, of course--how would one _redeem_ a monster like me? Would you perhaps wrestle me to the ground and master me like the Lord did back before the beginning?”

Crowley wanted to recoil, but something in him kept him still before that near-blind visage. He sensed that to pull back now would be a kind of weakness that Aziraphale would never let him forget.

“No. No, I told you--for an angel, it would have to be about love.”

“And when have I been loved more than by my Father’s hand?”

He said these things, these vicious contradictory things, with a cheeky smile and one arm clapped round Crowley’s shoulders.

“Don’t worry, angel. There’s really no rule that says you must give your love to a lover. The body is the body, and if it aches to be satisfied… if you do no harm where’s the crime?”

The other hand, the one Crowley hadn’t been watching because he’d been hypnotized like prey before predator, came to rest just on one knee.

“It’s,” He couldn’t especially see any, put like that. Not for humans. But angels were different. Their bodies weren’t built to crave, and it made the choice...more. It all came back to choices. “Hngh.” 

“Really now.” Aziraphale frowned, round face radiating tranquility while his hand danced complicated patterns up the inside of Crowley’s thigh. “I’m doing my best to understand your position, but your answers are lacking their usual clarity.” The very tip of one sharp nail brushed the ruddy thatch of hair between Crowley’s legs, and he cursed the efforts he’d taken in order to pass among the other naked bodies there. 

 _Get up. Run. Tell him to shove it. Tell him to get the hell on with it. Ohhh_. New sweat beaded on Crowley’s upper lip, his dick already in danger of breaching the water’s surface. Which meant--

Aziraphale’s lips pressed against his ear. “As far as anyone knows, we’ve gotten up and excused ourselves. I assume you can make yourself invisible?”

He was still able to nod, at least. _This thing makes gentleness obscene_. 

“Wonderful. That’s the spirit.” Every word tickled his ear cruelly. “Don’t forget the water.” 

Crowley’s hips spasmed as clever fingers wrapped around him. His foot splashed, and a few heads turned in their direction. Crowley held his breath, willing himself to be still. _They’ll see me if I move_ ; he repeated it like a mantra, and slowly the thought began to wrap around his brain. If he made too much noise they’d see him like this. Prim, perfect Gabriel and that prick Michael looking down from their clean posts, and here he was: hair sticking to his forehead, mouth parted and panting, utterly at the mercy of the most talented hand God had surely ever created. 

“Your theory might have merit, angel. I’m feeling fonder of you already.” 

This was a choice. This was--an effort. This was not like what he'd been told happened to Visitors in those long-gone cities. He _allowed_ his corporeal form to gain pleasure from what the demon did.

He gasped, a shivering thing, and felt more than heard the rumble that went through Aziraphale's chest with its spattering of platinum hair.

(His body was so real, so accurate--designed to get close to, so that no human would notice a difference.)

"Tell me, Crowley," he said pressing what might be a kiss to Crowley's temple where the hair matted down with sweat. "What wonders do you find, with your angelic detachment?"

His hand was slow, so slow, and time seemed to stretch as it went slower yet.

"Speak, messenger. I want to hear your thoughts."

 _Can I?_ Crowley wondered madly, _Can I do it without alerting them?_

Surely they were in a bubble, protected. Surely that was why Aziraphale spoke--why he could defy Heaven itself. He could hide. His kind could--

"M-music," Crowley hissed, and was rewarded with a firmer grasp and a second hand skimming his ribs. "Poetry--the epics they compose, the way they sing them from memory."

A soft chuckle was followed by an almost-too-hard nip to his earlobe.

“They--the bread, the bread ovens, the smell of them and the warmth--”

The demon’s tongue twitched in his ear, along the column of his throat, and he felt the vulnerability of such a position only when it stopped.

“One more and I’ll reward you with a kiss.”

He clamped his mouth shut, stifling any cry, any sound; his muscles shook like one possessed.

“I don’t need to breathe, you know. Not really.”

His grip on the edge of the pool was white-knuckled but slipping. “Funerals,” he gasped. 

“How unexpectedly macabre.” His tormentor raised an eyebrow, relenting long enough for Crowley to string together a sentence.

“No, it’s. It’s like magic. It’s the worst thing for them, the end-all of everything they know. And then they all come together and remember they’re alive. Reaching out to each other, like they’re patching a hole…” he trailed off, feeling more exposed than he had when he stripped all his clothes. “It’s defiant.”

Aziraphale’s expression had changed; his grin had evened out into something flat, eyes a mystery. His hand had stilled completely. 

Uneasiness wormed at Crowley’s gut. “Not that, I mean, the Lord’s got it all settled of course, they shouldn’t be worried, but--”

His fingers slipped; he was submerged unexpectedly and completely. _It’s not so bad_ . Aziraphale was there too, his glass protectors left behind on the surface. His gold stare pierced like a lighthouse through the dark, one hand curled hard enough to bruise on Crowley’s hip. _No kiss?_ Crowley wanted to tease, but there was no air for his lungs. The last remaining bubbles were wrung free as that wondrous deadly mouth closed over his cock. 

Without thought--mortal habits--his fingers tangled in that mass of curls. Demons were made up of hellfire, surely; there was no other explanation for the clench of heat working him over, melting his brain from the groin up. They were floating, though they should’ve hit bottom by now; he bent double, sure he felt a purr along with the drag of teeth along his shaft. He’d die. He’d die like this and then he’d have to look Michael in the eye and explain _exactly_ why he needed a new body--

The hand anchoring his hip was now an iron vice around his jaw, forcing his attention back to the moment. Water choked him, but only for a moment; then it was fingers, worming their way inside and making a sleeve of him. Again without thought he sucked, calmed somehow to be set to work as he was wrung out by an expert tongue. Wretched and filthy, connived and perfectly content to be so; he gave in to the thoughtless rhythm above and below, and the fire that built in him became a roar in his ears, ordering every muscle stiff as climax wracked through him. Copper salt oozed down his throat, filling the gaps where he’d emptied himself. 

He floated to the surface in a daze, rattled by his unholy baptism. Aziraphale was once more a safe distance apart, one hand idly touching his lips. His knuckles were oozing blood, Crowley noted, but as soon as he had it seemed a trick of the light. 

“I wasn’t certain I would survive that,” the demon said. “How intriguing.” 

“You. You _weren’t sure--”_

“Calm down, Crowley; people are going to stare.” He stood, slipping free of the water’s embrace; it sluiced down his pale-pink body and left every well-fed healthy curve shining, and the downward motion drew Crowley’s dazzled eyes to.

Well.

It was red, and hard, jutting from curls darker than those on his head and almost too aesthetically pleasing, and just a tiny bit higher than Crowley’s _face_. Aziraphale moved nude and aroused to the labrum to cool his head with a lack of shame that Crowley hadn’t seen since Eden.

“People _should_ stare,” he hissed, emerging from the hot water in an odd, graceless crab-crawl that made him feel less exposed, less embarrassed about his own body and the lingering effects. “They’d be staring if you’d _died,_ you damned fool!”

“Ah, but that wouldn’t be my problem.” He smiled, sweet as honeycomb. “And think--you could have come to my funeral!” The lenses went back on with a movement that Crowley suddenly suspected was too casual to be truly carefree. “I think it’s time I enjoyed the frigidarium. Care to join?”

There seemed no choice but to follow, a stew of emotions boiling in his belly. They would go along now and never speak of it again; Aziraphale in disinterest, and Crowley in shame. Certainly they could never cross paths again, and the world was big enough to see to it. No choice at all. They passed a graffitied alcove near the changing rooms, quiet after the afternoon rush, and before he could think--but after, crucially, he had decided--he backed the demon in. 

His reward was true surprise on that smug face, just for a moment. “This is a busy hallway, you know. Someone might see us.” 

“Then make sure they don’t.” He was dizzy from the bath, overheated; he was getting his bearings, staring at the new unavoidable center of the world. Shameless, flushed; when it twitched his heart jumped. 

“It’s alright,” Aziraphale had the audacity to be kind. “You needn’t spoil your story of being wickedly seduced.”

“Shut up.” He plunged his hand down and felt for hot, hard flesh. It made a perfect fit in his grip, and when he squeezed he heard a breathy “oh” from the demon. No one could have possibly heard it but him. 

He could get used to that. 

The carnal arts were worlds away from his experience, theoretics excluded, and he found himself at a loss for what to do besides mimic what he remembered from minutes ago: strong, hard strokes that mingled slow-drying bath water and the thin, clear fluid welling from the tip. Every so often he would squeeze, feeling the pulse of a strong vein along the shaft and tingling from another one of those gasps. Those clever hands were clinging to his shoulders now, holding on to him as a port in a storm. His own wrung-out member was already trying to respond again, and he willed it down. There was still the occasional perk to divinity, in situations like this. 

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice in his ear heralded the end of it, a sticky mess coating his hand and thigh. They swayed, leaning on one another; he was afraid to speak, lest the earth swallow him up. He felt ashamed--not for giving into temptation, he found, but because he had been so artless about it. 

“Wasn’t fair,” he rasped, burying his face in the curve where neck became shoulder. The incongruous blue owl was there, just a palmus away, so he swallowed hard and did not stretch to lick it.

“Nothing is.” Did he imagine the shaking of Aziraphale’s hand when it patted his back? The unsettling stillness dwelling within a body taking deliberately deep breaths? “I thank you, though, for your commitment.”

They rinsed off in the frigidarium, the cold on flushed skin somewhere between calming and painful, and then made their way back to the apodyterium to collect their belongings.

“Say,” Crowley said as they exited, “Why’re you wearing your cloak like that?”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale turned back, resettling the wool like a great black scarf about his throat.

“Didn’t you have a clasp, with the head of Minerva?”

“Oh, that. The capsarii stole it.” The sunset burned and reflected, making the glasses look like windows into hellfire. In the middle of each miniature horizon rose a column of smoke.

“D’you want me to get it back?”

“Get it back? Are you so thirsty to see punishment, after all that talk of fairness?” That delighted little laugh, again. As though Crowley were too naive for words. “No, no, I’m quite happy to have simply inspired the theft.”

Crowley nodded distractedly, turning to look behind him where the smoke hung like a ladder.

“...Why Minerva, anyway?”

“No reason, really. I suppose she reminds me of dear Lilith.”

“Ah.” What else was there to say to that? Crowley had seen her, once. There’d scarcely been more opportunity before she was sent out, without even a mate beside her. “She was--”

“There’s no need.” Aziraphale cut him off hard. “Empty platitudes are distasteful in your mouth, my friend. She deserved better.” 

“Guess she did.” He left it at that, uneasy. 

It earned him a smile. “You’re very kind. I do hope they won’t be too hard on you for it.” 

“Embodiment of love, remember?” Always in circles with this one. He pulled his own cloak close. 

“What was your little miracle, anyway? It’s not your way to look so down; I might take a mind to worry.” 

“Nothing,” he snapped out of habit. But it had been a long day and there were many long years destined to follow, or so he’d been told. “Tried to get the crops going. Encourage it to grow. There’s too many people going hungry, in the years since the earthquakes started.”

“I see.” Aziraphale said, and nothing more. They didn’t meet again until it was over. 

Crowley had been on his knees a full night by then, face streaked in soot. It was still snowing down. Anything that needed to breathe wasn’t any longer. And then there was that calm, steady step, coming to stand a gradus away, white feet black in their sandals. 

“It seems you can count this a success.” The demon’s gaze was straight ahead. “I’ve no one left to tempt, and in a century this island will bloom beautifully. You know, ash is a wonderful--”

“Goddammit.” 

“Careful,” Aziraphale said sotto voce. 

“How can you laugh at this?” His voice, hoarse from the heat, cracked. As though he didn’t know the one-word answer. 

“There’s no helping it. Everything goes according to the Plan; you and I and all of them are only part of that.” A hand came to rest on Crowley’s shoulder. He let it. “You should turn around. You’d have seen the boats.”

Stiff and exhausted, Crowley turned his head. There was only an empty sea. “Liar.”

“I was speaking metaphorically. You aren’t going to make it long here if you keep looking at what’s gone instead of what’s left.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 11Naturally, his name--and indeed his companion’s--would be something altogether different given the sequence of events required to arrive at this particular Pompeii afternoon. However, the ones with which you are familiar have been substituted in for your convenience.[return to text]
> 
> 22A passus is an ancient Roman unit of measurement, equivalent to 5 pes or in modern American length, 4.85 feet.[return to text]


	2. London, 1895 AD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time has begun to wear on Crowley as he returns to England from a trip abroad. His counterpart is present, and attempts to distract him from his dismay at the unfairness of the world.

Crowley checked his reflection in the mirror, hoping that he'd achieved approximately the correct level of fashionable deshabille. After a long moment, he decided that all seemed to be in order, and headed out the door.

Ordinarily he wouldn't have worried quite so much, but he was newly returned from America and a little bird had told him that tonight's festivities might be attended by someone he hadn't seen in years.

As far as he knew, the prick still lived in Soho.

Many of the usual stressors of modern life were obviated by angelic powers, and so he was able to live alone quite comfortably without servants in the mix. But occasionally, it seemed--quiet. He’d tried to make a go of it living in boarding houses for a while; it had lasted six months before he got tired of answering questions about his immaculate dress despite never visiting a tailor (just because he was a divine agent didn’t mean he had to go out a shambles). So he’d found a conveniently cleared little place and set a wall between his work and everything else. What was one more, after all. 

“Anthony!” The young man at the door greeted him brightly before remembering the air of disaffection they were all meant to be carrying on with. 

“Evenin’, Ernest. Keeping up those studies?” Crowley smiled at him, passing pleasantries with one eye on the crowd. 

He must’ve been obvious about it. “Don’t tell me you’re hung up on him as well. I might as well vanish into the earth.” 

“No need for that. Good to see you, great talk; er, who’d you say that was?” 

Ernest gave a despairing wail and stormed off, leaving Crowley to shuck his own coat. 

“Right. Fix that later,” he reminded himself. That done, he let himself breathe and listen for the phonograph. He’d gifted them to everyone he could reach when he arrived back, just to hear the clarity of it wafting through drawing rooms. He wanted to corner someone about that bloke Schumann, and why everyone turned their noses up at the standards you could hear on the street when that was where the soul and variety bloomed. 

“ _Crowley_? Is that you?” There was no mistaking that voice.

Wandering in his thoughts, he’d lost the first salvo. He closed his eyes for a beat, to prepare himself, and--

“Buh?” He managed intelligently. Aziraphale was outfitted in an almost garish amount of deep plum, only on him it somehow looked radiant. Demonic charms. His curls were looser than Crowley remembered, framing his face like something pre-Raphaelite, and so out of fashion as to be avant-garde. The tinted glasses were still firmly affixed, now rimmed in gold. 

“It _is_ you, how wonderful. When was the last time, Paris? Amsterdam.” 

“Can’t remember.” It had been Chicago.

“Of course,” Aziraphale let it slide, pausing just long enough so that they both knew he had. “So many years to keep track of. But never mind, the now is so much better.” He smiled like the sun. “Isn’t this marvelous? I hope it never ends.” 

Crowley searched for a way to disagree with him, because that was what they _did_ , the old opposition softened to banter after so many years and miles.

“Do you think that’s possible, then?” he asked softly as a redirect, watching his acquaintance sip at a glass of something golden and clinging, no doubt chosen as much for its attractive contrast with the suit as its flavor.

“Of course not. Tonight is the beginning of the end, and nobody else here even knows.” He took Crowley’s arm, casually intimate, and swept him along in the crowd.

“What have you done now?” Crowley murmured

“I’ve done nothing. But come, meet the people, the ones your little friend has abandoned you to.” In his lapel, a green carnation bloomed heavy and full, plucked at the absolute peak of its beauty and scenting the air with its peppery call. There were many about, drooping here and there like the cockades of some particularly daft revolution, but none had the vibrance of the demon’s.

He did his best to remember the names and the faces of the many many many young men who crossed his path that night, to little avail--save for those names he knew already for their works.

“Funny to see you taking up with poets.”

“Of course I adore them. The written word is a beautiful thing, and they capture it with beautiful hands.” The hum of the party faded away behind them, as it always seemed to when he was with Aziraphale. “Some of them say such sweetly foolish things, they almost remind me of you.”

Crowley scowled. 

“Are you truly angry with me for violating your principles, or are you simply perturbed that we have something in common?”

 _Don’t take the bait_. If he opened the door to entendres that would be the whole evening. “Seems beneath you, your Highness.” 

“Oh, please,” Aziraphale put a hand to his face. The satisfaction Crowley felt was very unangelic indeed. “It’s all such nonsense. One can’t walk a metre without tripping over newly crowned nobility down there. They’re embarrassing themselves trying to catch envy upstairs.”

“You could’ve said no,” he pointed out. In his experience, there was very little Aziraphale couldn’t do if he took a mind to it. 

“They gave me a crown.” He looked almost huffy as Crowley burst into laughter, straightening his shoulders. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. I’m shocked you’ve stirred yourself to dress appropriately for the evening.” 

“I know style when I see it.” He plucked at his lapel. “Not always about being the biggest peacock in the room.” 

“Why, if I didn’t know you so well I would say you sounded _vain_.” 

“It’s practically a requirement to fitting in around here.” And there was of course, the empty space that should’ve so exemplified that quality. “...have you seen him?”

“Mm, I’m afraid not.” At least Aziraphale did him the courtesy of not pretending at ignorance whilst lounging on a sumptuous-looking and probably bloody uncomfortable couch. “Oscar rather went off me a few years ago. I presume you read the book?”

“There was a certain resemblance, yes.” Crowley smirked and intercepted a glass of red for himself. “You never told me you had a painting.”

“Trade secrets, my dear!”

“ _I_ didn’t get a painting!” He sat down on the couch, which was devilishly more comfortable than it ought to be and smelled only faintly of mildew, once you got close.

“You don’t… need one, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s moods were always hard to read, but this close something flickered in his features, oddly conflicted as though he lived by any rules at all. “You’re not hiding anything.”

“Can I see it? Your _true face?”_

Aziraphale rolled his eyes at the teasing, or seemed to. It wasn’t much, but now and again Crowley thought he understood, and that was balm enough for loneliness. With one thing and another, the subject dropped for the night, and Crowley hardly thought about it until a few days later when all Hell broke loose.

 

* * *

 

 

As the millennia dragged on, it seemed more and more that Aziraphale’s divine punishment wasn’t his Fall but the unavoidable foolishness that found a way to flock to him. At least Oscar’s life held on to its precious sense of poetry: three days that frivolous suit had made its sad display before he’d come to his senses, and now he’d be descending into Hell. Aziraphale had gone to the trial out of duty more than joy, bearing witness as the great cogs of the Plan crushed another beneath their wheels. 

And now beside him, sickeningly drunk, sat the greatest fool of all: Heaven’s own, so greatly possessed of faith he believed fairness existed. The back room of Aziraphale’s fine and reputable shop had played host to all manner of debaucheries, but this was a new and particular class of wretchedness. He found he didn’t like it.

“Why di’n he go?” Crowley asked miserably. His hands shook, spilling a fine whisky across the counter. The wine had finished ages ago. 

“You must’ve known he wouldn’t.” Aziraphale rescued the bottle, pouring two fingers for himself before refilling Crowley’s glass. “Not after he tied his own noose.” 

“S’pointless!” The glass cracked as it made contact with the table. “He could’a laid...lain...lied...he could’ve bloody hid out for a few years. Go on making plays, I said. Got a place you can go. Now s’gone.” 

“Yes, well...”

“An’ you knew!” His russet curls fell over his glistening forehead in the perfect suggestion of debauchery as he pointed a lean hand at Aziraphale. “You knew, and you--”

“I told him not to pursue the suit.” Aziraphale gave the truth unvarnished and fast, to curtail whatever fantasy Crowley was about to unleash. He didn’t want to hear it. “I told him that there was no winning, because _truth_ is an absolute defense for libel, and because he is guilty of his crime.”

He sighed and slid his glasses up with two fingers, a move fluid with over a millennium’s practice, and pressed his eyelids down hard until spots of color burst in the darkness there. They reminded him of something.

“He’s not _guilty._ And he’s worth so much more than some stupid law.” Crowley’s mouth looked wet and bruised with the winestains from hours past, and it spoke from something like a heart.

“He did it. And it is true. And so he will be condemned.” The alcohol burned, like everything burned. “That is how the law works.”

“He said they didn’t even…” Crowley’s flush sat high on his cheeks, from the drink rather than any embarrassment, but a charming image nonetheless. “Said they were. Platonic.”

“So now we’re differentiating. And what would you consider to be the line, if there is one? Anything short of full buggery gets a pass? Of that, I assure you, he is also guilty.” He smiled silkily. “I should know.”

“You. With him?”

“I don’t ascribe to your lofty _rules_ about such things. He’d no need to know what I am; it was enough for him that I’m beautiful, intelligent, and incredibly skilled on my knees.”

They had clashed in more than words a handful of times over the centuries, encounters that were neither planned before nor discussed after aside of the gradual gentling of their barbs. But it hadn’t stopped Crowley from stammering like the virgin he wasn’t every time it came up. On better days, that was precisely why Aziraphale did it. But just now, it sent prickles of annoyance down his back.

“So s’your fault. You… seduced…” Aziraphale prepared to lay claim to all of it, take his crown of filth, but Crowley didn’t give him the chance. “Sorry, I. I didn’t mean. Not your fault. Or his.” Unexpectedly he turned and hid his face against Aziraphale’s chest. “I don’t wanna anymore.”

“You’re perfectly capable of sobering up on your own.” For the best if he did, really. The bottom of the bottle held ugly reflections.

Crowley shook his head. He was drooling on immaculate velvet; it was with saintly patience that Aziraphale forgave him. “Not that. I can’t,” He looked up, and it was worse than the demon had feared. There were tears in his companion’s eyes. “Sometimes it’s--hard. To keep doing this. I wanna stop. Feeling like I can help them… it’s a lie.” 

“That’s quite enough of that.” Crowley had hidden his face again and didn’t see the way Aziraphale’s eyes flicked upward, as if to see whether the sword had yet plummeted down. They’d danced the tune of enough split hairs. “Think what you’re saying. Without your efforts, I should have the world kissing my shoe before the month was out.” 

“Wiles.”

“Wiles.” He brought his arms up around the spare, human form that curled against him, feeling every bone and sinew that held it together. Feeling the empty spaces where something altogether bigger and grander was hidden from unworthy eyes. “Wiles, my dear,” he allowed a rumble into his voice. “Who but you could possibly stand against me?”

He allowed other things, too, feeling desire enter hot and wet like mulled wine filling a mug.

“I can’t resist you,” Crowley said too too quietly.

“You resist me endlessly.” He tilted that pathetic neck, tipped the loose-lolling head back and claimed a kiss sour with wine and whiskey and nearness to the edge.

Aziraphale knew that edge well, though he’d only skated it once.

Crowley hummed into his mouth, no fight in him--there never was, sweet thing. Not made to fight, surely, but there had been so many casualties in the War that here was the Angel of the Eastern Gate curling in his arms.

“You can resist me however you like,” he whispered in an unnecessary break for air, taking the angel down beneath him to a floor littered with papers and dying flowers. “I’ll never do a thing you refuse.”

Bony wrists, fitting his grasp as though made for it; his rings wouldn’t bruise, because he decided so. He pinned them loosely above his angel’s head, his hold easy to slip. But Crowley only stretched his legs, strands of red falling rakish over his eyes. What a picture of the era he made now, for all he complained. But the space between his thighs still lay sleeping. “S’hot,” Crowley mumbled, squirming ever so slightly.

“It will feel better if you shake the spirits.” _And make me feel less as though I’m canoodling with the dead_. 

The angel parted his lips. “Would…” Even blasted free of sense, he couldn’t beg. 

There was an idea. Those wandering from faith so often craved another to slide into that place of worship, and Aziraphale excelled at substitution. He would have to take care to play his hand carefully, less his push send his dear companion over the edge rather than back onto land. 

“Your manners are appalling.” But he acquiesced, sealing his mouth over Crowley’s and drawing out the drunken stupor with a careful, probing tongue. When there was just enough left to leave bright eyes and a tingling flush, a looseness to the joints, he withdrew. “Better?”

“Still hot.” But there was a returning grin now, not the lifeless stupor that sucked the joy from seduction. For the moment the darkness was at bay, kept back by simple base arousal. 

“Poor thing.” He tore the top button of Crowley’s shirt free with his teeth. 

“Hey!” 

“Manners, Crowley. Someone ought to have taught you better by now.” He pressed them together, relishing the beginning hardness of it, the knowledge that just for now Crowley chose to feel something for him of all creatures--even by process of elimination.

Aziraphale was first, last, and only, and he was a fool for feeling gratification about any of that, but foolishness was one thing he’d retained through the fires and Fall.

“How am I meant to be the rude one? I liked that shirt.” And yet he wriggled obligingly when Aziraphale transferred custody of both his hands into one of his own and began tugging clothing out of the way.

“Perhaps you should teach me, then. Since I am so far beyond all bounds.” He smothered Crowley’s mouth in a deliberately sloppy kiss, drinking him down in great quaffs, and explored Crowley’s chest, every line and plane, the small bronze nipples that rose to his temptations. “Tell me when to stop.”

All the while he ground them together at the pelvis, feeling Crowley respond with heady quickness to the rhythm he set.

“Why would I...ever...fuuuck…” Crowley’s back arched off the ground, constrained by the demon’s comforting solidity. He thrashed and struggled safe in the knowledge he wouldn’t escape. 

“This is why you’d make a wretched demon, dear.” The taste of salt and bitter nerves wore well on his tongue, cleaned away in blasphemous ritual. “Anyone can pull a trick, given time. Temptation is only truly beautiful when it’s knowingly embraced.” 

Awkward but determined, Crowley’s ankles hooked around the back of Aziraphale’s legs.

“Cheek.” He smiled fondly, raking his fingers up Crowley’s abdomen in rewarding punishment before going in for another kiss. 

“I meant it.” Their kind never needed to stop for the irritation of breath; but Crowley, dear, kind, selectively taciturn Crowley, picked the worst moments to spill up his guts. “You make it look easy. I mean. Surviving.” 

“It is quite difficult to take you seriously,” his voice hitched, “with you rutting so enthusiastically against me.” 

“When have you ever taken me seriously?” Crowley asked with a crooked half-smile, and then threw his weight enough to indicate that he wanted to roll them to the side.

(His wrestling with demons was considerably less difficult than most saints’ tales would lead one to believe.)

 _What does it feel like,_ Aziraphale wanted to ask. _How do you do it?_

Instead he stripped Crowley to the waist through mostly human means, knowing that the drag of cloth and the removal of fabric’s weight were their own enticements, and moved to kiss his way down the narrow body with its unselfconscious softness at belly, its shadings of hair.

He’d thought, once, that this could be the end of him, holy fire burning him from the inside out. Now he was almost certain it would be, in the grander scheme.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley caught his face, one hand to each cheek, before he could embark on destruction of the trousers, and so he froze. It was an inhuman immobility, one he knew to be unsettling when deployed. He felt the earpieces of his glasses shift just slightly with the brush of long fingers.

Centuries ago he would’ve demurred and played off his retreat with some lusty sleight of hand. Now he allowed it as a careful grip, like one taking food from a tiger (clever of him; he fared much better than the others), pulled the glasses free and set them to the side. 

“You too,” he said. 

“Fairness is not an ideal held up in bed more than anywhere else.” Still, he did love an audience, whether for a lecture or an orgy. Sitting up, he took his time casting away the ornamented layers he’d grown to love over the past decade. “I intend to wear mine in the morning.”

He had barely time to revel in his jibe before Crowley tackled him with the grace of a hooligan, biting what he could reach and leaving spiteful little bruises wherever he went. It was a dreadful struggle, Aziraphale helpfully tossing in commentary between their mutually muted laughter. It came to a stop as quickly as it had begun, Crowley nuzzling against his shoulder blades. “Didn’t know wiles covered tattoo maintenance.”

“Hmm? Oh, no; it’s new.” He passed it off quickly, hoping it would slide by. It would have been so much less complicated simply to lie. But he grew tired of it, only every so often. Only in certain company.

“A new… tattoo?” He knew, with a surety, what Crowley’s face must look like at this moment: Warm brown eyes narrowed, brows ever-so-slightly puckered, thin wide mouth flattened into a line as he tried to believe something he knew perfectly well wasn’t true.

“In a manner of speaking,” Aziraphale replied, and felt the tenderness of a kiss soothed onto his high right shoulder, onto the black outlines of a bird not dissimilar to an owl, wings outspread and styled like something a particularly upmarket sailor might have brought back from Tahiti ages ago.

“When?” Crowley’s breath chilled the dampness, ruffled the feathers which had no tangible presence.

“Perhaps a hundred years. Can’t recall.”

He’d deserved it, of course. And he wouldn’t forget the way the world had tipped, how the basket had taken away his sight of the crowd, how sound had lasted longest. He’d had time to hear the next descent of the blade.

It had felt like flight, cut loose from the weighty mass of a body.

Those long arms gathered him close, squeezing almost too hard, and he rolled his hips unsubtly back against the hardness that hadn’t faltered.

“I’m trying to be comforting.” Crowley deadpanned. “Be comforted. In the name of the Lord. Er, something.” It was only afterward that he seemed to grasp what he’d said, the absurdity and the danger of it. 

“And I am trying to tumble you into a stupor, and would prefer you not bring His name into things.” It was also rude, unconscionable really, for the angel to go about stealing his lines. 

“Sorry.” It was a dreadful thing about angels; they never really apologized except in service of making the recipient feel low. Somehow when demons did  the same it felt more honest. “Just...thinking. If I’d ever find out, if you ever vanished somewhere.”

“I suppose not.” Aziraphale turned his head. “No more than I for you.”

“I mean. One way you’d know.” 

It had come round again, had it. Their tussle this time was less playful, ending with the demon’s sharp talons gripped to Crowley’s face. “You will not dwell on this foolishness. Do you understand?” He pressed his weight against the arousal still trapped in Crowley’s tented pants, relishing the groan that followed. 

“Did you do this with him?” The question came from seemingly nowhere, snarled out even as Crowley’s large hands grasped Aziraphale’s hips, his buttocks, guiding him in continuing this unholy mess. 

“Did you fuck Whitman while you were gone?” Aziraphale shot back in absurdity, and was gratified at the flush that rose on Crowley’s nose and chest, the way his cock thumped.

“No! God, no--”

“But you wanted to. Of course you did. Now _there’s_ a man who appreciates the body.”

“You’re being a bitch. Why? Why can’t we just--”

He kissed the angel and allowed himself to be flipped again, dragged awkwardly lapwards in the spraddle of those long absurd legs.

“Fuck me,” one of them said, and it took Aziraphale too long to realize it was himself.

Crowley colored as he did when he was angry, not when he was embarrassed, and shook his head like a cathedral bell.

“Not willing to cross that Rubicon?” He smirked again, stoking that anger, that holy rage that drove angels. “I suppose we have kept it _platonic_ , all these years.”

But then, what right did he have to complain? Crowley was the nice one. It had become the mirror that centered his existence, the bellwether against which he could measure his outrageousness and, on occasion, remember that the Plan wasn’t only cruel. Only mostly. 

“Look, I can’t. Alright? I can’t. I could never hide that. They’ll find out, and they’ll come down here, and you--”

“Beg me for it then.” He sat back, enjoying the way Crowley tried to follow before his pride (tsk, tsk) caught up with him. 

“What?!”

“Moments ago you were gamely trying to renounce your divinity.” Aziraphale leaned down far enough to carry off the gesture and called his glasses back to him, resettling them primly on his nose. “If you cannot be bothered to value yourself, you can at least let me have the pleasure of seeing you really down in the dirt.” 

Ah, there was the more familiar flush. That was the truth of it, deep down: Crowley needed his wicked temptor as much as Aziraphale needed his scandalized saint. They could wander, but each time the bleak pit of eternity would pull them, invariably, back to their posts. And here they were. 

“Fuck off.” His shoulders were slumped, ears red as his hair, erection making a ruinous stain against his fly. For all the bitterness, it was a tantalizing image. 

“Try again,” he said very kindly, in the mein of a helpful schoolteacher, tapping a cruelly gentle finger on new peak of Crowley’s trousers. “Say, ‘Please, Aziraphale, as I am so terribly repressed from too many unacknowleged erotic Heavenly hymns, won’t you please bend me over that table and have your way with me?”

“You can’t be serious.” 

“And I think I’d like you to add a ‘sir’ in as well.”

“I’m not doing that!”

“But the rest?” He felt his lips curling up, up, into his very best sadly pitying smile.

And then he grabbed Crowley by the back of the neck and yanked him up, then forward, until his nose was well and truly acquainted with the lavish wallpaper.

“I will _never_ do what you tell me not to,” he whispered, running a hand down the length of curving spine. At the waist he went farther, lower, curved it around to release the flies and pull down the trousers just a bit, just enough to free Crowley’s member and let it jut vulgarly out, pressed against the wall.

Thank someone that he was still wearing boots with unfashionably tall heels.

“What are you going to do?” Crowley asked, half-muffled, in a voice that failed to hide excitement under the worry.

“Keep your legs together, angel. Your trousers should help with that.”

Crowley’s legs were already trembling, but only just. It intensified when Aziraphale dipped into the butter dish, made a show of it, and then coated himself with noisy strokes. Crowley jumped when he reached down.

“I said not--”

“Relax. Trust me.”

Crowley let out a high, reedy, disbelieving laugh at the most absurd thing that any demon had ever said, then gasped when Aziraphale spun him around again and landed him back against the wall with a thoroughly unnecessary flourish. The poisonous green paper was due to be ruined soon anyhow.

“I know it’s hard to stand up like that, but do be a dear and try.” And then, face-to-face and one hand on Crowley’s shoulder, he slid his glistening cock into the tight space between long, hairy thighs, just below the vulnerable testicles, till they were belly-to-belly with Crowley’s erection trapped snugly between them.

“Ngk.”

“I will _never_ ,” he thrust, “Do. What you. Tell me. Not to.”

“Stop!” 

And the demon did. 

Crowley stared at him, at a loss like one who had called for a smiting and then found their adversary in cinders. “...you. Stopped.” 

“I feel we would get farther if you listened when I spoke, dear.” He patted Crowley’s cheek, and found his hand cupping that long, bony jaw. It brought back memories. “The lines are wherever you put them; for myself there are none at all, just a blend of territory equally dangerous.”

“Yeah, but I,” dangling over the unseen precipice that threatened them both, Crowley plunged. “I don’t want you to stop.”

“You’re certain?” 

“You’ve got me bang against the wall with my knob out. I’m sure.” His tone dripped acid for any who might be Listening. But his head drooped forward, burying his face into Aziraphale’s curls. “Go on. Show me.” 

They found their pace again, Crowley grasping onto Aziraphale’s shoulders and trying to pull them closer together, as if he could reform them into one being and rewrite the Fall itself. There was pleasure to be had in the pettiest of tortures, stopping just short of the edge every time Crowley neared it just to relish the blaze in Crowley’s eyes. Just to see him gasp and clutch and _want_ what Aziraphale had the power to give.

“You. Are such. A bastard,” Crowley panted, as though he weren’t clutching Aziraphale’s arse and squeezing his thighs for all they were worth at that very moment.

It was the spite, maybe, that made Aziraphale smile so fondly. “You remind me of God.”

Crowley stared at him as if he’d suggested calling Upstairs and giving them a full recounting of the evening’s activities. “I thought you hated God.”

“How can one hate anything without knowing it well enough to love?”

“I--I don’t… hate you, Aziraphale.” He sagged slightly as he said it, giving into an unguarded embrace. 

The violence of their movements then would have knocked askew any mortal’s glasses, but Aziraphale’s held fast as he went faster, faster, dragging Crowley down for a kiss.

It had been too long--more than sixty years since they’d done this, and longer still--

 _It shouldn’t still feel like this,_ he was thinking as he felt Crowley stiffen and spill over their bellies, slippery and fragrant. _Can he feel it from me--_

Crowley sank blunt teeth into his shoulder, inches from his mark and hard enough to bruise, and that flash of pain and un-control sealed it for him. He finished and nearly collapsed, grateful for the wall which saved them both from the vagaries of weak knees.

Crowley’s face was so open, blissed-out and achingly soft, and Aziraphale kissed it too many times in the afterglow when he ought to be shoring up his defenses, saying something cutting and petty.

Later, as they worked on unnecessary brandies by the fire and Crowley’s head began to nod, Aziraphale took it up again:

“I wish you could.”

“Hm?” Marvelously mobile eyebrows, friendly expression, carefree as though he hadn’t just been contemplating something very like suicide tonight.

“Hate me. I wish you could.” Aziraphale stared into the fire through violet glass, watching the flames leap. “It would be--easier for you to last, if you had that fuel.”

“But I don’t. Couldn’t.” Crowley’s smile was not like the sun, but like a Star, and Aziraphale had ever followed where his stars led. “Have a little more faith in me, eh?”

As though he hadn’t already imbued every drop of the meager hope he possessed. Aziraphale had accepted long ago that there would be another reckoning, a Battle even more Final than the last; now came the dreadful realization that he would have a stake in it. “....I am sorry. About Oscar.” 

Crowley ducked, putting up his arms as though the heavens would soon begin to fall, then grew serious. His warm eyes appraised his companion as if under the impression there was goodness to be found. Aziraphale closed his eyes and silently relished the kiss to his temple, while trying very hard to give no sign that he’d noticed it at all. 

“We’ve got to hold on to what’s still here.”


	3. London, 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Antichrist is here. Crowley starts a dangerous conversation. Aziraphale fears he's playing with hellfire.

“So. That’s it then.” Aziraphale uncorked the final bottle of port from a case he’d stolen decades past, fingers only still capable of grasping the glass because his every cell was perfectly leashed in order to prevent the very fleshy impulse to scream.

“What do you mean, ‘that’s it then?’ How’d you expect me to take news like that?!” Crowley paced the accessible portion of the shop, vegan “leather” jacket falling off his bony shoulders. Churches had not loosened up so thoroughly as one might have thought, looking at Crowley’s band-reject fashion and foul mouth. But shelters always found space for him to work, and with a certain type of frantic-eyed youth he had an impeccable success rate. He’d never forgiven Aziraphale for his helpful contribution of learning texts, the relative extremity of which was so remarkable it made for a guaranteed conversation anywhere Crowley went.

“Not sitting down, clearly.” It was a shame Crowley was missing out on the port, which was a lovely vintage. Well, early birds. They’d be roasted same as the late ones, but they’d be better basted. 

“Don’t you pull your weary decadence act with me now,” the angel hissed, finally focusing back in on the table. “This isn’t some soiree you’re put out about being cancelled. It’s the fucking Apocalypse.” 

“It isn’t Berlin either, my dear. Or a raid. You cannot simply open your mouth and natter until the right ears are charmed by your suggestions. This is the  _ Plan _ .” 

“You say everything’s the Plan.” He looked so preciously passionate: hands with their cheap aluminium rings jammed into his pockets, head cocked rebelliously like he wasn’t servant to the highest authority. 

“Yes, and it’s led us all the way here. Inef--inevitable.” He was drinking too much, which he shouldn’t do, but if ever there was a time…

He was going to miss this. Hell had alcohol, of course, harsh clear facsimile of corn liquor that burned going down like holy water. Hell had chairs and tables and Brutalist architecture and even, on occasion, very unpleasant books, but.

Aziraphale hadn’t set out to be a demon of temptation, but it made sense to play to one’s strengths. Every little sensual desire in the world breathed in his constructed body, easy to use against others. Easy to fall for, himself.

He ran a hand back through his hair, hooking it just-so behind his ear.

Comfort was a danger, but this moment, looking at Crowley looking back at him with eyes full of the world’s sorrows, felt well-worn and broken in, circling around yet again to their crux. The difference seemed to be that Crowley was finally aware of it.

“You can’t just…” Crowley clenched his jaw mutinously, a tic going that made him look achingly real, and then turned away. “Come to lunch with me, Aziraphale. Let me buy, since we’ve apparently got so few left.”

They stuffed themselves into Crowley’s ancient car, the tape deck blaring about thunder and being washed clean by rain until Crowley turned it off with an irritable snap. Their destination was a little hole in the wall, the kind that Crowley adored for its bright-eyed revolutionary youth and that Aziraphale first tolerated and then loved for the covetous secrecy they inspired, the joys of talented cooks and well-made food so jealously protected as to strangle them in the bud. Whether the owners starved to death or breached the bubble of success, it would alter the careful, liminal nature of their existence--suspended between Heaven and Hell, a Rorschach Test of human character. 

“It’d make my life easier if you’d stop selling suffering as a virtue,” Crowley had told him once. As though this era weren’t perfectly made for him; both sides laid claim to the internet, but Crowley had a gift for it that Aziraphale never did. An eye for the way the supposed “cold and impersonal” could make small voices glitter like stars and link hands across oceans. He was greeting some teenagers now, a stork in plastic and denim; though the children rolled their eyes, they had a gentler glow about them when he left. It made Aziraphale’s heart go soft, in a way that demons’ distinctly shouldn’t. 

“Sorry,” Crowley grabbed his chair in one hand and spun it, draping himself over it the wrong way round, “Need to start making my goodbyes. S’only right.” 

The menu was tattered and made of paper, practically a code to be deciphered. Aziraphale passed it off with the contented knowledge that food would come, and that it would be plentiful and unexpected and warm. 

“Guess this place will be first to go,” the angel mused. Whatever propaganda might have suggested, guilt was an ironclad tool of the heavenly host. “I’ll miss the surprise.” 

Any worthy adversary of Crowley’s would know to stop his mouth and quick; the longer he talked the more he wormed his way into your heart, stop-start and too earnest. Aziraphale would miss that surprise. 

“Not a lot of the unexpected in Hell, I hear. Nasty, sure, but predictable.” 

“From whom do you hear--Nevermind. How will your side take to your stirring up sedition, my dear?” His voice was lighter than air, so disaffected only because it had been honed sharper than a needle. “There was a certain punishment for that back in the day, but I imagine they’ll have come up with something worse by now.”

“I think I can handle it,” Crowley said with completely unearned confidence.

Whenever he thought of that--which was more than he should--Aziraphale’s chest tightened, his brow furrowed.

He would miss this, seeing his enemy oozing over the chair-back and onto the table, spiky frosted hair bobbing and one vintage steel-toed boot sprawled halfway out into the aisle but somehow never where the servers needed to step.

“This isn’t why I told you, Crowley,” he said, sipping at a peanut-butter-and-banana-infused porter and reflecting that the microbrewery trend had been one of his better schemes. “So you could get all worked up. I thought you just--deserved to know.”

“And, what? I’d wait around politely for us all to die? I’m meant to thwart you.”

The food arrived then, a welcome interruption, and though they both tucked in with enjoyment Aziraphale could sense Crowley’s constant watchful attention.

“Did you think we’d make it this long?” Aziraphale asked, keeping up the veneer. The covered porches of the United States’ southern climes were soaked in his particular conversational skills, though obviously they’d had to come up with ‘bless her heart’ on their own. 

“Never doubted.” 

“Liar,” he said, fondly. “I can regale you with the times you’ve spent at the brink, if you’d like.” 

“But you were there, weren’t you?” Like it was check-and-mate. “So I never worried, not really.”

“That only makes you a greater fool,” he huffed to cover the warmth that suffused him.

“Admit it,” the angel said when their places were clear. “You need me. I do all the things you’re scared to, because what if it doesn’t work. What if you lose that last shred of possibility that we’ve got free will like they do.” 

It took six millennia of practiced nonchalance to keep Aziraphale in his chair at that. Watching Crowley trip over his feet, listening to his two-bottle-deep bouts of existentialism, it was easy to forget what he was. That all those times over the centuries, at his lowest points, he had never broken. Not really.

“This is the last chance we’re going to get. The last time anything will really matter--not just for them, but for us. You can ride it out like you always do, but what then? They’ll bring down their great battle, and it’ll all be decided. And you’ll tell yourself there was nothing to be done, but you _ won’t know _ , will you?” Crowley sat back, taking a swig of his rosemary-and-thyme lager and regretting it, judging by his expression. “But if you’re fine with that, I guess there’s nothing else I can say.” 

 

* * *

Crowley felt wrath simmering in his breast as they finished their meal, as Aziraphale savored each bite and as ash and dust sat in his own mouth. The world seemed false around him, images playing out but dead already, like a cinema left running in the aftermath of a plague.

He started the engine and tried not to notice how neatly Aziraphale perched himself on the passenger seat, one of the few people who’d ridden there beside him in the past century. Tried not to notice the sharp suit and the smart collarless shirt and the damned glasses that kept him from ever really being able to see what the being he knew better than himself was  _ thinking. _

Stevie Nicks’ voice rang out, clear and horrible:  _ “Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise / Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies / And if you don't love me now--” _

He yanked the tape while it was only half-ejected, sending magnetic ribbon spilling everywhere, and felt only momentary guilt at chucking it out the window.

What was a little litter in a doomed world, compared to not having to hear “The Chain” again?

He drove them on autopilot back to his own place, because something in him wanted some kind of control over this Goddamned tragedy.

First time for everything. 

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow as they pulled to a stop, but didn’t comment. They didn’t really spend time at Crowley’s place, an apartment made with Heaven’s austere minimalism in mind but then cluttered over with half-mended guitars and shy seedlings and notes stuck to the walls. Crowley lived half out of himself, always, his thoughts burbling out the same way his form strained around his essence. 

He’d kept it in check once; if a representative came down from Upstairs now, they’d say that Aziraphale’s wiles had done their poisonous work. But that wasn’t true (or mostly). He’d just found that music was as fun to make as to hear. And with that realization, it slowly began to seem as though his efforts were sticking, building up, rather than evaporating like a water cup thrown into a blaze. 

They wouldn’t approve of what he was doing, but that hardly mattered. He and Aziraphale had swapped so often that forging a report on his own hardly seemed shocking at all. And now, now they were going to come down and take it all away from him. The place he’d finally built for himself, the little bit of faith he’d managed to rekindle after the longest and darkest night of whatever soul he possessed. The same shadow at his side pretending it was already over. Fuck that. 

“Right, so first thing is the kid.” He started tearing open drawers, looking for the map he was certain he’d been given somewhere around 1967. “Where’d you leave him?”

“What will you do if I tell you?” Normally Aziraphale would fold into the nearest chair, comfortable and with his back sheltered from attack. But now he stood in one shadowed corner with an eye on the window, as if it might burst open with some fresh horror. “Are you prepared to kill him?”

“We don’t--you don’t know it’ll come to that.” Ah, there. It was torn up one side and had a coffee stain over Gloucester, but it would do. 

“But if it does. Is your conviction strong enough? You can’t even kill rats, dear.”  

 “Don’t.” He swallowed, cricked his neck. “Don’t ‘dear’ me. Not now.”

Aziraphale’s round, infinitely gentle face didn’t change a line, but Crowley could  _ feel _ that his words had an effect. Or maybe he just--hoped, like he always had.

“Ah. Are we already enemies again?”

“We’re not allies, if you do this,” Crowley said. “That’s for blessed sure.”

Aziraphale liked to think he didn’t have tells, but there were a few, and six thousand years had given Crowley time to learn them. The small, quick flicks of his hair, preening it back in place; the tap to his glasses frames to resettle them. The twist of his pinky ring, happening now.

“I see.” And then  _ nothing, _ nothing when Crowley had never seen a being as in love with the world as this one. “Aren’t you tired, though? When your side wins--”

“How can you not care?” He threw his hands out to the sides, the map accordianing out with the motion. “How can you not fight? You fought before. You must’ve  _ cared _ once, about how unfair it all was--”

“Nothing in this world is fair. The Plan is not--”

“That’s an excuse. You’re a Goddamned coward.”

“I learned my lesson, Principality.” The demon seemed to stretch, head rotating too far to one side as his eyebrows rose. “I’d rather not see you learn the same. It--affects one.”

Crowley hadn’t feared Aziraphale, not in centuries or more, but there was something about how he leaned forward and seemed poised to strike that spoke  _ uncanny _ , said  _ wrong, _ even to him.

“You cannot fight it, Crowley. You cannot change it. It will consume you, no matter how you struggle.” His hands curled, not balling into fists but going rigid and angular and clawed, and it was the shaking held there that calmed Crowley somehow, because he could comprehend anger. Rage drove angels, but this was new, because Aziraphale was never truly angry. Jaded, bitchy, irritable, but not--

Crowley’d wondered more than once whether they’d burned the holy rage from whoever this used to be, somewhere during the Fall.

He took a deep breath. Counted the exhale, one, two, ten. He placed his fingers carefully over the known-unknown of Aziraphale’s hands. “We all go sometime.” He’d been going for nonchalance, something cool or maybe even gallant, but even he could hear the tremor in his voice. 

It would be wrong to say Aziraphale screamed. The mouth on his face stayed as it was, a thin and implacable line. And yet the sound resonated through them both, a screech that made the atoms of his form vibrate and threaten to separate. At the same time he was very gently hit by a freight train, pinned to his desk by sheer force of will as Aziraphale’s body looked down at him, remote. Civil. 

“It’s all right.” There was a crack splintering its way up the reflective amber glass. “I can keep you safe from your own foolishness.” 

He struggled, trying desperately to reach his opposite number. If he could just touch him… 

“I have to disabuse you of some notions. For your own good, you understand.” 

Crowley wondered if this was what mortals saw, the slow realization that something wasn’t quite right. That they had walked merrily in to tea with a creature making its dinner plans. If they could feel the body that was larger than its container, the essence that had green-reflecting eyes in dark places, hungry. Lonely.

“Were I to rip your heart out here, and then your eyes; if I stitched you up with your limbs round wrong and your neck leashed with offal; it would not begin to prepare you for what it is to Fall. Not for you, who radiates His light so thoroughly it has suffused your very bones. Better I should burn you up with cold fire.” Weeping, weeping; the demon’s face was dry. 

Aziraphale moved then, hovering his hand over a small pot with a plant that, for all the miracles Crowley could spare, had not yet grown beyond a seedling. “I could burn all this for you. You could watch me; it wouldn’t matter when you woke. Do you understand? You are imagining a simple change, like moving houses for a better view.” His hand fell away from the leaves without touching. “In truth, you would wake up alone, having never moved. You would be a stranger to this place, and to me, and to yourself. Your very  _ name _ gone from you. And  _ that _ you would know, with certainty. There would be a gnawing for this missing thing, burnt up so that it can never be found. And in return you would have the knowledge, as deep as righteousness before, that you exist to poison.” 

Crowley did his best to meet that fractured gaze head-on with all his eyes, because he could sense the danger now in showing weakness, in backing down from this.

His lips felt chapped by the sudden dry heat. Instead of licking them he spoke.

“You said once.”

“Yes, Angel?” And there was nothing casual in that word--nothing light or joking. Crowley heard for the first time how weighted it was with significance.

“You said that you were made to Fall.”

He could not risk praying that this was the correct thing to say; his faith was not in God here. Blasphemous, and yet the weight on his chest relented, just a bit. That stone-carven face turned from him.

“What I am--my part in the Plan--could not be without a Fall.” He was still spilling, still an enormity wearing that familiar harmless face, forcing the mouth Crowley had kissed and more into a loose and messy smile. “And yet the Plan required me, not made as I began but as I was after. My mistake, my failure, is my purpose.”

“You said I was made to catch you.  _ Let me.” _

And then he wrenched free, not just from the pressure but half from his body as well, from the low physical bounds he’d accepted for so long. Demonic powers were of the same pattern, same source, as his own, and they’d been matched since the world began to turn.

If a Plan did exist, surely it had been made to pair them so.

Aziraphale’s many eyes widened, broken-halo horns rising like the tufts of an owl, as most of Crowley crashed into him with the force of a meteor and the weakness of a human.

They had done many things over the millennia, held and hurt and comforted one another as the process of pretending at humanity slowly morphed into being human; but they had never done this. They had never Known one another so nakedly, for all that each had dared the other to look. 

It was no surprise that Aziraphale had lied--it was so in his nature that Crowley had long forgiven it of him. But the lies went deeper than he’d thought. They were veins and roots, caught snug around a molten gold expression as immense as all creation and as small as a wistful sigh. His feathers were webbed-between with vellum and the thrill of first times. 

Aziraphale was made to settle into lungs, to tinge each new thought with his smell and string stars behind the eyes. His touch was hunger, turned inward; the gold-plating wore ragged and spare and patched where something had been torn, its shape half-remembered and ever-mourned. All around them knowledge flowed in a rainbow of scents, an explosion of textures, and as it neared that center each would fade tremulous to gold and sink beneath the whole.

Crowley offered up the knowledge of first rains and new growth, stalks battered but standing, and watched it knit against one wounded edge. It was raw, the roots barely sunk, but it held: blue-grey and silver, a note sung against the absence of light. It set off ripples of panic, and far below him bones dug into his tendons, and he paused. 

_ I’m stronger than you think _ . He said, and then repeated.  _ Look. Look. There’s no poison in me.  _

Aziraphale softened in his arms, and found his lips. He was shaking. Crowley’s lungs were already full of loam and persistence; the gold he took under his skin. Tentatively, he began again.  _ You’re a bastard _ . He wove in his second Sundays, full of sun and good wine.  _ You piss me off.  _ The moon at Babylon, from the tower’s highest spire, where their hands had brushed. _ I’m fucking grateful _ . Winter in Berlin, now whole again, and a blessedly familiar face at his door. 

It was not whole; no one being could do that for another. To attempt it would collapse the soul, and turn all they had built to bitter needles. But bit by bit, Crowley made a scaffold of himself, built from what they had been to one another. What Aziraphale had forgotten and disbelieved of himself. 

_ I am not who I was-- _ Aziraphale whispered, weak and weary.

_ No, you’re not. _ Crowley had wronged him, in mistaking fear for cowardice. In failing to see the depth of the damage, the change, and how hard Aziraphale clung to the one thing that could explain existence beyond that not-death. Crowley pushed himself in, rough and messy and full of failings, too, failings he’d always been forgiven because that’s what God  _ did _ for His children.  _ You’re yourself. The one you built here. Don’t let it end, _ he begged as somewhere outside their bodies touched, and rain fell from a clear blue August sky.

_ Don’t let them take away the place that made you. _

It was the taste of honey-comb and spices on his tongue, the echo of songs never written down and lost a thousand years past. Flesh, supple with oil and need, and he burned within but it could not be unholy. His eyes burned, his hands burned, and he held on like Janet to her faerie knight, feeling soft black feathers and the rending of talons on what was not his body.

Blessings were useless here, but so was damnation. All he had to offer was himself and all the world. Tangible, sensual bindings, the things Aziraphale so courted and craved and soothed himself with, the things he’d taught Crowley to value.

_ Please, _ he begged.  _ I can’t let you go. _

His wings were not the ones that lifted them from that abyss, but he sensed that the climb was just as foreign to one who had spent six thousand years and more there.

They did not break apart--it was far too late for that. But gradually they slipped back into the forms that had come to suit them, that were not wholly true or fiction. Their bodies were holding one another, naked in the storm and shivering under an open window. Aziraphale bowed their heads together, short of breath.

“I’m frightened.” 

“I know.” But it was important to give it shape, not just between them but in this world that was theirs. 

“I’m also...bloody furious.” 

“I know.” He couldn’t keep the fond laughter from his voice. Their legs were wound together, as if their skin could melt as easily as their selves. “Me too.” 

The demon gave a small resigned sigh, the both of them picking up their affectations from where they’d scattered on the floor. “If you’re intent on doing something so foolish, I can hardly let you do it alone. Think of my reputation.” 

“Perish the thought.” All was still as they contemplated one another. Crowley wove his fingers through Aziraphale’s, the two of them neither wholly in one place nor another, except here. This place that was theirs. “Whatever happens, we go together.” 

Without hesitation, the hand in his tightened. “Yes.” 


End file.
